Puls - ...and she looks like a million dollars

(Molde/Fire Flate/PULS): As anyone who has visited her shop Bare Jazz in Oslo will know, Bodil Niska is one of the most committed and knowledgeable jazz enthusiasts you could ever hope to meet. And as anyone who has heard her various modern mainstream recordings on tenor sax will testify, Bodil can play - and then some. And, yes, this lady from the Far North of Norway looks like a million dollars.

For her two sets at Alexandra on the opening night of the festival, Bodil put together a quartet featuring some of the cream of Nordic jazz: Fellow Norwegians Egil Kasptad (piano), Bjørn Alterhaug (bass) and the Swede Pelle Hulthen (drums).

A good many in the full house including me - had walked down to the concert from Pat Methenys extraordinary, high-energy opening concert with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. It took but a moment or two of Bodils lovely rounded and measured sound and dynamically sensitive phrasing to remind us that there are many ways both to play and to enjoy listening to jazz today.

With a well-paced choice of harmonically interesting standards including The Touch Of Your Lips, I Fall In Love Too Easily and Sometime Ago, the quartet eased its way across territory long made familiar by such stellar names as Webster and Hawkins, Chu Berry and Zoot Sims.

Kapstads Bill Evans-like touch and lyricism supplied delicious counterpoint to Bodils story-telling lines while Alterhaug and Hulthén (a dab hand with both brushes and sticks) meshed like the proverbial dream team. There were no surprises, but with music like this, you expect surprises the way you expect a Premier Cru bottle of Chablis or St Emilion to taste sour.
to taste sour.

Michael Tucker

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